Linux Device Driver Turorial
Basics The role of a driver is to provide mechanisms which allows normal user to access protected parts of its system, in particular ports, registers and memory addresses normally managed by the operating system. One of the good features of Linux is the ability to extend at runtime the set of the features offered by the kernel. Users can add or remove functionalities to the kernel while the system is running. These programs that can be added to the kernel at runtime are called modules and built into individual files with .ko (Kernel object) extension.The Linux kernel takes advantages of the possibility to write kernel drivers as modules which can be uploaded on request. This method has di erent advantages: The kernel can be highly modularized, in order to be compatible with the most possible hardware A kernel module can be modifi ed without need of recompiling the full kernel. Linux driver modules can be found in: /lib/modules/<version>/kernel/drivers/ where <version...